As a common disease endangering human health cancer has a high prevalence and disease burden in the world. At present surgery and chemoradiotherapy are the main treatment options for tumor. For early or locally advanced tumors surgery can remove the tumor completely providing the opportunity for radical treatment. Chemoradiotherapy has a good effect on local tumor control. However the efficacy of single operation chemoradiotherapy or combined operation with chemoradiotherapy may be limited by the drug resistance and clinical stage of patients and adjuvant therapy should be actively sought clinically. In recent years tumor metabolism and tumor nutrition have become the focus of clinical anti -tumor research. Ketogenic diet is a high fat and low sugar formula diet with reasonable proportion of protein and other nutrients which is widely used in the clinical treatment of brain diseases and metabolic diseases. Neoplasms can be regarded as metabolic diseases. On the one hand ketogenic diet therapy for tumor patients can satisfy the survival energy of normal cells on the other hand due to the restriction of ketone body utilization of tumor cells it can effectively inhibit their growth and metabolism and thus play an anti-tumor role. At present ketogenic diet can play an anti-tumor role by reducing glucose level inducing oxidative stress improving mitochondrial ketogenic body metabolism anti-inflammatory and enhancing immunity and other mechanisms. This article reviews the anti-tumor mechanism of ketogenic diet and the recent clinical research progress.